Posted 3:01 PM by Gene

I just got Volumes 3 and 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection (I'd have gotten Volume 5 if Amazon.com had had that on sale) and aside from Whoopi Goldberg's notorious disclaimer (notorious for the disclaimer and the disclaimerer) came this one on both boxes:

THE LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION...IS INTENDED FOR THE ADULT COLLECTOR AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN.

Could I have asked Leon Schlesinger or Frank Tashlin if their cartoons were suitable for children they'd likely have given me a blank stare. (No pun intended.) Clearly they weren't made for children; they were made for an audience that counted children, but they were also made for adults. In short, they were made for a mass audience. They were no more made "for children" than the brilliant rotogravure comics of the twenties and thirties. The audience for cartoons started bifurcating when the dread Famous Studios aimed its output squarely at kids. Who in his right mind would let any child see a maudlin and upsetting excretion like "There's Good Boos Tonight"? This is unsuitable for any audience of any age. Yet presumably this is "suitable for children" because someone said so. Thus began the destructive notion that a show-biz property cannot be made suitable for the whole, in time perfected by JACK's Hell-invented idea that there is virtue in age segregation. Of course the disclaimer also owes to how the equally infernal Associated Artists Productions (and its successor United Artists) just THREW Warners' and Paramount's cartoons onto the tube indiscriminately as filler for Kansas City Stars, so overexposing them as to help breed the belief that cartoon violence causes real violence. And only now through superb technology do we get to know just how good the best of these are -- but because of their excess baggage we have to feel almost ashamed to like them, and worse, to let our children join in the laugh.